Fantasia Fest’s Frontières market is trying to change how genre films get made

On the fourth day of the 2015 Fantasia Festival’s Frontières
market, writer-director-producer Graham Reznick is still energized, and still
eager to share what he calls his “hilarious elevator pitch” for his new project
“The Designer.” “It’s In
the Mouth of Madness meets Short
Cuts meets eXistenZ...
meets Citizen Kane.” And
though Reznick says this with a smile, he’s not kidding.

On the market’s first morning, Reznick stood beside his
producing partners, Peter Phok and veteran horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden
(both from the production company Glass Eye Pix) and told an auditorium full of
industry types his plan for a kind of interwoven omnibus film, about a reporter
investigating the mystery of a missing video-game inventor. When they finished,
Reznick, Phok and Fessenden walked across the street to two adjoining classroom
spaces at Concordia University, where for the four days of Montreal’s
Frontières, they and 19 other sets of writers, directors and producers sit at
small tables and take meetings—20 minutes at a time.

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By design, Frontières is an inversion of the usual Hollywood
power-dynamic. After making their initial pitch en masse, filmmakers spend the
weekend entertaining distributors, financiers, casting agents, and
post-production houses, in what’s been likened to a “speed-dating” spin on
deal-making. People with money and resources approach the artists with ideas
for how they can help. And when the bell dings, they all shake hands, and
rotate to another table.

The Frontières market is one of the major ways that Fantasia
Fest has been setting itself apart from the dozens of other genre-focused film
festivals that keep popping up around the world. Begun in 2012, Frontières aims
to be like the Sundance Institute, but for artists who prefer horror and action
pictures to muted family dramas and quirky comedies. According to the market’s
director Lindsay Peters, “We’re working
to build a community—a circuit.”

Writer-director Todd E. Freeman and his co-producer Lara
Cuddy know what that’s about. They came to Frontières for the first time last
year with their project “Love Sick,”
an expansion of a short they’d landed in “The ABCs of Death 2.” They took a shot at Frontières because,
according to Cuddy, “We already had the
budget and the schedule, we had the cast attached, we had promotional photos,
we’d done effects tests. We thought, ‘We've got all this stuff, let’s just put
it all together and go and see what happens.’” What happened was that they
walked away with something pretty close to full financing; and the
Portland-based duo are due to start shooting “Love Sick” in Ontario early next year.

In the meantime, rather than sitting idle, Freeman and Cuddy
hurriedly polished up a script for another
film, called “The Beautiful”: a
racially tinged “southern gothic” drama. They did this mainly because they knew
they were coming back to Fantasia, and wanted to have a good answer to the
question, “What’s next?” But they ended
up landing “The Beautiful” in
Frontières too, and shot a proof-of-concept trailer so that they could get the
market wheels rolling, Last year, all they really needed was money. This year,
they’re getting a fuller sense of all that Frontières has to offer, and have
been listening to suggestions about casting and special effects. In just two
years, Freeman and Cuddy have represented the gamut that Peters says she wants
Frontières to run: from films that are barely out of the word-processor to
projects that are just a couple of pieces away from being ready to roll.

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Even though Frontières is working toward its own network of
alumni, it’s not that common for filmmakers to come back in consecutive years.
Frontières is competitive—so much so that Fantasia has added a second edition
in Brussels, headed up by Julie Bergeron. (“There
was a need for it,” Bergeron says. “Of
course, there are many fantastic film festivals everywhere, but organized as a
market, this is the only one.”) Only twenty projects are featured in each,
and during their four-day weekend, in addition to the initial pitch and the
whirlwind sessions of meetings, the filmmakers can participate in seminars
focused on specific aspects of the movie business, and targeted networking “power
hours” that force people to work past the usual cocktail party cliquishness.
(Though Frontières features plenty of cocktails, too.)

For Reznick, who’s been active in the movie business for
over a decade, Frontières has been a new experience. “I'm used to pitching one-on-one and kind of reading people and giving
them a sense of the story,” he says. But there he was on Thursday,
explaining “The Designer” to a
crowd, which included everyone else with a project in the market. He loves that
after giving his spiel once, he didn’t have to repeat it to every new person
who showed up at his table. “Everyone’s
on the same page,” he explains.

One new wrinkle for the 2015
Frontières was an emphasis on works-in-progress—some from earlier markets, and
some just from Fantasia-friendly artists. At a Saturday morning event, four
sets of filmmakers showed footage from movies in various stages of completion,
from the documentary “78/52”
(an in-depth historical and critical analysis of the shower scene from “Psycho”) to the genre-bending “Bad Blood” (a lysergic
horror/detective hybrid about rapidly mutating “were-frogs”). Then there
are the completed films that came up through the market, like the 1980s sci-fi
throwback “Turbo Kid,” which
was a part of the very first Frontières in 2012 (after being born of a short in
the first “The ABCs of Death”
anthology). After a successful festival run that kicked off earlier this year
at Sundance, the creators of “Turbo
Kid” took a victory lap of sorts at Fantasia, with a sold-out screening
on Thursday and a “how we did it” panel on Friday.

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This is all partly an extension of what Peters means when
she talks about building up a Frontières community. Reznick says that he was
encouraged to enter the market this year by Phok, who attended the Brussels
edition earlier this year and was so excited by what he saw that he wanted to
be a part of it. As Freeman explains, there’s an element of support and renewal
to Frontières, especially for those who attend Fantasia every year. “Everyone sort of meets back up here to see
what’s coming next,” Freeman says.

But there’s also a real effort
being made here to change the way that all the components of the filmmaking
process interact. One of the goals trying to make the process more efficient
than even the recent crowd-funding craze (which is often more about
accumulating money than in using it wisely). Reznick admits that he and his
Glass Eye cohorts came to Frontières mainly seeking financial backing, since
they already have a network of collaborators and partners that can get a movie
made. But he adds, “The interesting thing
about this market is not what we came here looking for, but what we’ve learned
we actually need.”

The team behind “The Designer” have talked with agents
who could possibly get a bigger-name actor to do a few day’s work in one of the
film’s many small roles, to help raise its profile. And they’ve talked with
players in the foreign markets, who’ve given them some idea of what they can do
to make “The Designer” easier
to sell abroad.

“It’s not that it's going to affect necessarily the content of the film,”
Reznick says. “But just getting involved
with international sales people ahead of time means that I know when we make
this movie it’ll be seen in France, or wherever. Which is great, because making
movies in a vacuum is not a great way to do it.”

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Unlike Sundance or the Toronto
International Film Festival—where
distributors sometimes try to shut out all other bidders by making pre-emptive
offers—Frontières is more like an ongoing
conversation, which might blossom into something days, months, or even years
after Fantasia ends. On day two of this year’s Frontières, the wrestling-themed
horror project “El Gigante”
sold to Raven Banner Entertainment, but those kind of announcements are rare,
at least during the fest. (Peters notes that after the “El Gigante” announcement, the sales action heated up more than
it ever has at Fantasia, but a lot of that’s being kept private for now.)

Instead, the vibe at Frontières
is more social than mercenary. On the last day of the market, Reznick confesses
that he’s talked so much that his throat is sore, and he jokes that, “Someone needs to invent a pill that makes
your voice not disappear during
a film festival.” But he’s also certain that he’s accomplished something
here. Even if nothing immediately comes of the 20-minute blitz-meetings and
cocktail party chit-chat that he and Fessenden and Phok have done all weekend, “It’s still a win.” At the least, they’ve
met people who might be able to pitch in on the next Glass Eye project.

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